“He scared the hell out of me!” There is nothing more frightening than hell, and that’s because heaven is the perfect opposite, the fullness of love, which casts out all fear. God’s greatest desire is for all the men He created and will create to be in Heaven with Him for eternity, and His greatest sorrow is for any of them to end up in Hell, in eternal separation from Him, in a state of perpetual fear, as well as anger and sadness, the three basic emotions evoked by the presence or expectation of evil. So, God, using demonically possessed billionaires and power-intoxicated psychopaths, is now literally scaring the hell out of people by allowing hell to incarnate itself in a last ditch effort to save them. It’s working for some, with the terrifying emerging totalitarianism waking them up from their habitual neglect of God and their souls. Others, however, mostly establishment professionals and bureaucrats, are embracing hell for the diabolical and sadistic pleasures it affords—torturing, bullying, and scapegoating. And the rest, the herd of compliant sheep, are trading their priceless and unrepeatable gift of life, with all its depths of drama, responsibility, meaning, purpose, mystery, and adventure, for an infantilized life of safety and mindless obedience and conformity, willingly enslaving thereby both their bodies, minds, and spirits to the most evil human beings ever to exist on earth.
I for one am not going to question God’s providential judgment that allowing psychopaths and satanists to create hell on earth, with all the unspeakable horrors we have already witnessed during the past two years and those even worse to come, is necessary for their and our salvation, as well as His glory and inexorable Judgment. It seems to me that God is presenting us with a foretaste, not of the beatific vision, but of the miserific vision, as a kind of pre-death trial to see where our hearts are. How many people in the world actually love God? I hope I’m one of them.
I am a religious person, devout even, and was before the plandemic, but I am not sure how well I was doing pre-plandemic, and how well I would have done if hell didn’t emerge in March of 2020. I surely did not recognize how complacent I was about my own life, the preciousness of every moment and the dramatic significance of every thought and action. I am much less complacent now. I did not recognize then how precious everyone around me was, how each conversation could be the last. I took for granted my freedom to live as I pleased, and even though I tried to live according to God’s will, I was not doing this with the urgency and diligence and humility God requires.
When they came out (when the world was still sane), I watched the Lord of the Rings movies with great enjoyment but also gravity, both yearning and fearing to be caught up in such a cataclysmic drama of good vs. evil, and perhaps being a main protagonist in it. And I read then much end-times theology and apocalyptic literature with an analogous seriousness and thrill. But unless it actually happened, the Great Tribulation, I mean, unless I was forced into it, as it were, I don’t think I would have ever had the magnanimity and courage to seek out the kind of trying circumstances and perilous drama necessary to achieve heroic virtue. I would have been quite content with safe vicarious counterfeits.
What I am trying to say is that for us who recognize that Saruman and Sauron and the vast army of orcs are now at the gates—indeed, they are past them— the time we are now living in is a great gift from God, one of both judgment, mercy, and opportunity. By putting us at the center of Mordor—and perhaps even Tolkien didn’t describe with sufficient depth the evil we are now facing—He is all-but forcing us to be saints, whether it be of the warrior, healer, teacher, leader, encourager, or victim kind. What God is doing with the others who seem now to be aligned with Mordor (Many of these call themselves Christians) whether knowingly or not, is His business. Our job is to try to save them if we can, to pick up the pieces of their ruined lives if and when they wake up, and to fight the enemies of all that is good, true, and beautiful with the courage of Hobbits.
I always told my children as they grew up that just as they watched the movies full of good guys and bad guys, and good vs. evil, so is the Kingdom of God that we are living in and cannot see, yet the reality goes so far beyond what we could ever imagine from any film or book. Waking up to the realizatIon that we are actually LIVING the story is another thing altogether, and as you said, God has allowed this time in the world to wake us up from our slumber...but how many of us are awake now and wishing only that we could go back to sleep? Good and evil are at war, and so the flesh and the Spirit. But Jesus Christ is faithful...He promised He would not lose a single one in His hand that the Father has given Him.